Ambitious new book captures the 19th century's lasting impact on our world

The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century
by Jürgen Osterhammel (translated by Patrick Camiller)
Princeton University Press
4.5 stars

This is not a book for wimps. It's not just the historical significance of Jürgen Osterhammel's The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Your reviewer nearly broke his nose after losing control of the brick-sized, 1,192-page tome.

It's weighty in every sense of the word. Indeed, every word carries the weight that comes with a wildly ambitious - Osterhammel calls it "impossible" - attempt to draw together the threads of that extraordinary "long century". The result - being published next month - is an epic, masterly and sprawling mosaic of the age that built on, if only as reaction, foundations laid down by the Enlightenment.

Having torn the god of superstition from his pulpit, humanity exploded into action - not just shattering centuries-old political and social structures (starting from the American and French revolutions to the colonialism that engulfed Asia's dynasties and overran Africa, to the industrialisation and globalisation of war and revolt at the epoch's bloody finale), but technological and economic ones too.

We learnt to leverage the earth's store of carbon - using coal to turn steam engines that were harnessed to looms, to ships' pistons, to railway engines. The carbon age gave us unprecedented mobility and the industrial economy; but we needed an equal revolution in ideas - new ways to work, to finance, to trade, to govern - to reap the benefits of new technological efficiency.

Space - that great protector of individual experience and cultural identity - was diminished by steam and later vanquished by the telegraph. The first sub-sea cable connected Britain and continental Europe in 1851; 15 years later, the Atlantic was conquered; by 1885, nearly all large cities were linked to Europe. Although costly - telegrams ate up 15 per cent of The Times of London's budget in 1898 - the system transformed the way humanity experienced itself.

The way we think about time itself is a 19th-century construct - while sailors had long used Greenwich Mean Time, late in the century railways still had conflicting clocks: in 1870 the US had 75 different "railroad times"; France didn't toe the GMT line until 1911.

Innovations in printing, film and photography, and distribution - by sea and rail - accompanied new ideas about free speech, national identity and equality (or class-based consciousness, at least) to shape the mass media, realist novels and film. Statistics and censuses became state-directed social sciences. Libraries and museums sprang up as ways to store and reflect on human existence.